Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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error of judgement that would offend and alienate those she most wanted to be close to. She should return to her meal, but all she wanted to do was to scurry back to the sanctuary of the toilet and lock the door. She did neither, staring at a curled-up, dried-out piece of wallpaper that seemed to resemble her career.
A pretty minor one at that.
Maybe that’s all she would ever, could ever, be. Maybe Billy Kelly was right and she should have stayed with him, where she belonged. Maybe Maybe Airlines would have to fly her straight back to Arlington and that box bedroom she never should have left. Thoughts of home made her want to go upstairs, curl into a foetal ball and fall asleep, but somehow she had to carry on: it had been almost five minutes and she had to go back in. Later, she would think it took more guts to walk back to the table than on to any battlefield.
By the time she got there, the conversation had moved on. Only Becky saw the dewy glint of tears she was trying to hold back.
In her room that night, Rachel read more of Danny’s book. She didn’t much feel like it, but she needed to have her faith in him restored. It was towards the end of the chapter on Sarajevo.
The only reason I paid any attention at all to Ljubica was because she was a little girl with no front teeth and her hair in pigtails. I guessed she was six or seven, and when I walked past her, near the Unis towers, she was skipping in the snow and laughing hard. In Sarajevo, laughter had become something out of the ordinary, enough to get you noticed. I smiled at her and she smiled back.
I had just turned the corner when I heard the mortar’s impact, and part of me knew who its victim had to be. I ran back the way I had come and she was already in the arms of a heavily bearded man—her father, I assumed, though I dared not ask. He was screaming at the sky, accusing it of this atrocity. He shook a fist at whatever gods up there he thought had done this. Ljubica’s little body had been torn apart, her pigtails were wet with blood. Somewhere in her dying face, I thought I could see a trace of that same smile she had given me, that laughter that got her noticed.
It was the Lowenstein technique again. She doubted she’d ever have the confidence to write about laughter being ‘enough to get you noticed’, but whereas the day before, she’d have admired its audacity, now she thought it might just be corny. She asked herself if it was all entirely true. Had Ljubica really smiled at him, or was that just poetic licence? Had he embellished his story, as he embellished his well-worn anecdotes at the table? What was it Becky had called his writing? Fictional. For a moment she wondered whether Ljubica even existed, or Nermina either, for that matter.
Becky knocked on Rachel’s door again, with more Vranac.
‘I brought something to cheer you up.’
‘But I’m absolutely…’
‘I know you heard. That man’s just so far up himself sometimes.’
Rachel gulped down the dry red wine and soon it was working its wicked magic. Becky drank in sympathy. Rachel was grateful for her company. She might have been suspicious why this perpetually cheerful stranger had latched on to her quite so fast, but on a night like tonight Rachel realised that if Becky needed a friend in Sarajevo, then so did she. Becky had stood up to Danny for her, and she couldn’t ask for more than that.
‘You need to learn to ignore him. And anyway, it was our fault. We should have held you back from snogging the crazy doctor.’
‘It was a peck not a snog,’ protested Rachel.
‘Well anyway, I find him quite attractive in an older-man kind of way. Don’t tell Danny.’
The drink helped turn Rachel’s shame to anger. How dare Daniel Lowenstein—or Danny or whatever the fuck he called himself—who barely knew her, by the way—judge and condemn her, and on the very first story of her on-the-road career? Well, fuck him, the wine said; fuck him and his sanctimonious bullshit.
‘He was my hero, you know.’ Rachel might as well have been confessing to a sordid fantasy.
‘Who, Karadzic or Lowenstein?’
‘Lowenstein, you idiot.’
‘We noticed. Listen, he still can be. He’s a great guy and a fabulous journo. We love him to death. We go back a long way.’
Becky started talking about how they had all met three years earlier during the Serbs’ other war, against the Croats. Edwin had just left the army in 1991, knowing plenty about war but nothing about journalism. Kaps was the opposite, an experienced wire reporter but new to the battlefield. Danny had taken both of them under his wing. Becky had been there at the same time, with another photographer called Frederique.
‘Freddie, we called her. She was only 20, and way more talented than me. We were all driving in a convoy to Vukovar one day, the five of us. The Serbs had flattened it, as only they know how. We were in soft-skins and a round came through the window. Took off half of her face, that lovely, lovely face. The worst thing was her eyes, though. Her agency in Paris paid for the best eye surgeon in the world. She couldn’t lose the gift of sight, the gift of taking pictures. She couldn’t; but she did. The operation failed.’
‘I’m so sorry. What happened to her?’
‘Freddie? Oh she’s alive and kicking, but her world’s a darkroom otherwise she’d be out here with us now.’
Rachel wondered if she’d been lined up as a replacement and it sent a shiver through her, but Becky was moving on, so fast it was hard to keep up.
‘Just take it as a warning. Anyway, d’you want to know how to really piss him off—Danny, I mean? When we were up there—in Pale—this really seedy guy offered me a kind of facility, to go and see some Serbs in action. I told him I didn’t want just any soldier, I wanted a sniper. I want to know what it’s like to be on the other end of that high-powered rifle. I want that picture of him looking down on his victims, to see his finger on the trigger, his eye gazing through the telescopic sights. Picture of the bloody year. Well guess what? The guy agreed.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Nope. Said they’re going to line up Sarajevo’s kingpin sniper for us.’
‘Us?’
‘Of course. I do the pics, you do the words.’
Becky explained how they would cross over the front line into Grbavica. It was only a stone’s throw from the Holiday Inn, but they would have to go the long way round, across the airport and back into the city from the Serb side, stopping off at Lukavica barracks for Republika Srpska paperwork and a minder.
‘In peacetime, we’d be there in five minutes, but it could take us three hours. Still, I guarantee it’ll be a story. They say he kills half a dozen Muslims every day. Most of them babies in their prams, probably.’
‘So why would he want to talk about it to us?’
‘Because he’s a cocky little shit, I expect. Pleased as punch he’s top of the league and wants the whole world to read all about it. It’s the whole Serb propaganda thing.’
‘And we’re playing along with it? I’m not so sure I want to be part of that.’
‘Oooh, so we’ve decided we’re not covering the Serb side of this war, have we? Fresh into town, and we’ve already worked out who’s in white and who’s in black?’
‘Ain’t exactly rocket science.’
‘Ain’t exactly objective, either. I think you’ve been listening to Mr Lowenstein after all. Look, the point is, we crucify this sniper prick. Let him hang himself. Whatever he says, your readers end up hating him.’
The prospect of a good old-fashioned exclusive—her first in Sarajevo—started to appeal to her. She didn’t want to let Becky down, not after she’d shown such solidarity, and if she lost more of Danny’s respect—well, he didn’t seem to have too much for her in the first place. Before she knew it, she could feel the moral high ground